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• Licensing Tragedies: Malibu's Street Fighter Comic

  This is an adequate time to be a Street Fighter fan. Thanks to the the launch of Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix and Street Fighter IV on the horizon, we have been given a reason to keep breathing throughout the day. Even better, we can go to our local comic retailer and exchange tuppence and a ha'penny for the very competent Street Fighter comic books by Udon. Purists can even help themselves to translated Street Fighter manga, full of bristling hairdos and hoarse oaths. Ah, but life wasn't always so beautiful. There was a time when developers were scared to let US-bound video games and Japanese culture touch each other, so American comic book companies were commissioned to break out their Crayolas and scribble some cash-in magic. Bad things happened, Malibu's Street Fighter comic being among the worst. Fans of The Simpsons might recall Marge Simpson's declaration that everything must be paired up: a woman for every man, a salt shaker for every pepper shaker and a dog for every cat. Malibu noticed that in the Street Fighter games, Chun Li wasn't paired with a man and they decided that must change immediately. So we have golden flashbacks where Ryu and Chun Li recall the love and laughter of their salad days. Of course, the narrative outside of the flashbacks are serious business. Things have changed, harumph harumph. Times are darker. Read More... Posted Nov 27 2008, 01:04 AM by Nadia Oxford with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: street fighter, capcom, comics, nadia oxford, licensing, licensing tragedies, udon, malibu

• Trailer Review: Wanted

  Being something of an equal opportunity nerd, I don’t limit myself just to videogame geekery. I am also known to enjoy a comic book now and again. Not graphic fiction, nor graphic novels. Comics, funny books, four-color rags. Some of them involve improbably proportioned men and ladies performing impossible acts of vigilantism. One of my favorite scribes of such material is Mark Millar, the Scottish gent best known for his summer event series called Civil War that saw Iron Man and Captain America punching each other. Millar’s also the latest comics writer to start selling damn near all of his properties to Hollywood studios for big screen adaptations, the first of which actually came out this past summer. Wanted the movie didn’t have a whole lot to do with Wanted the comic book outside of some basic premise and tonal elements, but it was still a decent flick to eat popcorn to. It was simply missing the comic’s bite. The videogame adaptation of Wanted, due out in early 2009, is notable for a couple of reasons. First, even in trailer form, it looks significantly better than the vast majority of movie-game tie-ins. It’s also a sequel to the movie as opposed to a direct adaptation, which isn’t unheard of, but it’s still an interesting choice for a game not releasing alongside a theatrical or even DVD release. Most exciting, though, is that the Swedish gunslingers behind Bionic Commando’s rebirth, GRIN, are making it. Read More... Posted Nov 24 2008, 05:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, bionic commando, grin, comics, morgan freeman, Angelina jolie, Wanted, mark millar

• Greed Looks Good on Samus

  Yeah, uh, so I write fanfics. Shut up. The reason I'm revealing this and plunging my approval rating into the negatives (rather, further into the negatives) is because last week I made fun of the Valiant Nintendo Comics of olde...but I shouldn't. At least not all the time. It's really not easy to create a story where there is none. Not to say that every creative endeavour should automatically get an A for Effort. The Worlds of Power books based on games like Mega Man 2 could have been a lot less stupid. On the other hand, when your cover art is defaulted to a game's box art (in other words, a flamer in blue spandex), I guess you may as well pound a few and see what you can come up with. Valiant's Nintendo comics had moments that made my eyes ache, but at the same time it did a couple of things really well. For instance, Samus. Samus has always been a girl of few words, except in Metroid Fusion when she caught a case of the chatties and wouldn't shut up about her ship, her mechanical love interest and her pet dog, Sparky. She's mostly been silent since, with Nintendo/Retro Studios preferring to leak bits of her past through subtle, adorable means. But at the beginning of time, Valiant had their own take on the female bounty hunter: brash, violent, cocky and greedy. And it was pretty cool. Read More... Posted Oct 06 2008, 06:50 PM by Nadia Oxford with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: metroid, retro, comics, nadia oxford, merchandise, bounty hunting, samus, captain n

• WTFriday: The Adventures of Sonichu

  Note to readers: WTFriday is a weekly feature where I find something stupid about video games and get you to laugh until it goes away. Please try to forget this is what I normally do every day of the week. What is it about Sonic the Hedgehog that naturally includes him in all aberrant online behavior? This is the question we will try to answer today as we explore the mind of a manchild and try not to get lost or sign up for DeviantART accounts.  The manchild in question goes by the hacker alias of "Sonichu;" and for a brief biography, I'll turn to our friends at the Internet's bullying headquarters, Encyclopedia Dramatica: Chris-chan (AKA: Sonichu, CWC, Christian Weston Chandler) is a self-proclaimed 26-year-old "high-functioning autistic" virgin man-child, and creator of his own awesomely drawn series of comics starring his brilliant crossover of Sonic and Pikachu. He is also incredibly arrogant, sexist, homophobic and racist. Despite being a complete loser, his standards for a "potential Sweetheart" are laughably high and specified. He is known to stereotype women, often thinking that they are unable to notice him at the mall because they are "too busy shopping". In case you couldn't tell, the rabbit hole on this one is pretty goddamned deep.  But all you need to know is that some well-meaning fans have transformed his semi-autobiographical stories into a full-fledged multimedia experience, much like how Ken Burns combined banjo music and a few pictures of the civil war and ended up with PBS gold.  Here's the first episode: More unmedicated fun after the cut. Read More... Posted Sep 19 2008, 05:00 PM by Bob Mackey with | with 5 comment(s) Filed under: sonic the hedgehog, youtube, comics, bob mackey, wtfriday, sonichu

• Castlevania: Curse of the Stupid Red-Headed Kid

  So I'm one of about three people who really enjoyed Castlevania: Curse of Darkness for the Playstation 2. It was pretty easy, pretty linear and pretty dull next to my personal Saviour, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, but I really liked hatching and evolving the Innocent Devils. I had dragons, a phoenix, a maggot-gnawed crow named Bonnie Brae and some kind of deity that looked like the product of a questionable encounter between an angel and a devil. I am okay with alternative Pokemon raising. I was pretty excited when I heard Tokyopop is publishing a Curse of Darkness manga adaptation. I was even more excited when I landed a review copy. When I opened 'er up and was hit in the face by a red-headed lead boy named Ted, my excitement drained like a fratboy's bladder on a Sunday morning. Read More... Posted Sep 15 2008, 03:11 PM by Nadia Oxford with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: castlevania, playstation 2, manga, comics, nadia oxford, stupid kids, tokyopop, castlevania curse of darkness

• Are Comic Book Games Going To Get Better? Soon? Please?

  All his talk about Superman 64 and the upcoming DC Universe Online got me thinking, just how many truly worthwhile video games based on comic books have there been? Spider-Man & Venom: Maximum Carnage was fourteen years ago, and the X-Men arcade game was sixteen years ago. In recent history we've had Activision's surprisingly thorough X-Men Legends and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance games. Everything else has been decent at best. Hold the phone, those good ones were all based on Marvel comics, not DC, Image, Dark Horse or even Oni (though we all want that Scott Pilgrim adventure game to come true)! While Marvel is responsible for their own share of far-from-fantastic games as well, there's been a solid amount of buzz building for them recently. Read More... Posted Jul 23 2008, 02:30 PM by Derrick Sanskrit with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: derrick sanskrit, x-men, superman 64, comics, dc universe, scott pilgrim

• Where is Joe Madureira?

  If you read mainstream American comics in the 1990s, odds are you have an opinion on Joe Madureira. Controversially named by Wizard magazine as one of the ten most influential comic artists of all time (others on the list included Jack Kirby, Osamu Tezuka and Will Eisner), Joe's work on Marvel's Uncanny X-Men and his creator-owned Battle Chasers single-handedly launched the American manga craze that is still being felt today. He abruptly quit comics in 2001 to follow his dream of working in the video game industry. Not a whole lot has been seen of him since. Joe contributed to the all-around meh Playstation brawler Gekido, then worked on Tri-Lunar's Dragonkind, which vanished when the company went out of business. After several years of delays, Joe finally saw the release of a game with his direct influence in the 2007 PC MMORPG Dungeon Runners. Ever heard of any of those games? No, I didn't think so. Read More... Posted Jul 18 2008, 07:30 PM by Derrick Sanskrit with | with no comments Filed under: derrick sanskrit, legend of zelda, where is, gears of war, x-men, thq, e3, comics, darksiders, joe madureira

• There is Nothing Funny About Bionic Commando Funny Books

  Have you ever been disappointed with your geek kung-fu? You go through life thinking, “Why, yes, I am a gigantic nerd. My nerd knowledge-base is vast and potent. No one can challenge the veritable wealth of useless knowledge I possess, the sheer brain real estate that I have devoted to media instead of human experience. Why, I could have been a physicist! Instead I know about Mega Man continuity.” And then something slips by you and you entire world comes crashing down! There’s a Bionic Commando webcomic that’s been running since March. How in the holy hell did I miss this?! Read More... Posted Jul 18 2008, 02:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, capcom, bionic commando, love, ben judd, comics